The present invention relates to a computer-implemented system for presentation of information. More particularly, the present invention relates to presentation of search results.
Presently, the most common searches over the Internet are keyword searches. A user enters one or more terms into a search engine and the search engine returns search results. The search results comprise a list of items or locations (e.g., uniform resource locators (URLs) of web pages) that contain the search terms. The listing may also include a short excerpt from each items or location showing the presence of the search terms. FIGS. 1A-1B is an example of a portion of the search results provided in response to the search term “jaguar.” Search results entries 100 are provided as a list of URLs with corresponding short excerpts.
Some search engines allow users to search for images. Referring to FIG. 2, an example of search results including images is shown. The search results comprise images with associated identifier information laid out in a grid format (in columns and rows). Each image (e.g., an image 200) has an image file name (e.g., a file name 202), size information (e.g., a size information 204), and source URL (e.g., an URL 206) as its associated identifier information. The associated identifier information is metadata provided with the image and/or is information provided by the URL's web page. In other words, each search results entry (e.g., the image 200, file name 202, size information 204, and URL 206) comes from the same source (e.g., the web page associated with the URL 206). If the user clicked on the URL 206, the user would see that the image 200 is contained in the web page associated with the URL 206.
Another way that search results can include images is in the context of shopping websites. When the user enters keywords or otherwise specifies products, a list or grid of desired products is displayed. Each displayed product can include an image of the product and associated information such as the price and product description. However, similar to the search results of FIG. 2, each search results entry is an image and its associated information (e.g., metadata) that are already tied to each other. The image of a given product would not be presented with information about a different product.
Even though search results can be displayed in a number of different ways, the returned search results is often large. The large number of search result entries makes it difficult for the user to reasonably look through the results. Depending on factors such as the ordering of the search results entries, the broadness of the search terms, and the total number of search results entries, the particular entry or item that the user is actually looking for may exist on the fifth, tenth, or later pages of the search results. In some cases, what the user is looking for may not even be within the returned search results. Even with sophisticated searching algorithms or ranking algorithms, it is often not possible to predict what each user is actually looking for and to reduce the number of search result entries accordingly.
Including images in search results can facilitate quicker review of the search results. However, the current use and value of displaying images along with textual information is limited, because the textual information presented with a given image is merely information that is already tied to the image. In other words, the images are in effect merely a kind of “short excerpt.” The number of search result entries is not reduced by including images in the search results. Each search results entry is still configured from a single source (e.g., the URL's web page and any metadata associated with the web page). The user still has to scroll and skim through the search results to locate his relevant content.
Thus, it would be beneficial to provide search results categorized or clustered by different concepts. It would be beneficial to abstract and compress the search results into a readily comprehensible form. It would be beneficial to present multi-media content in search results. It would be beneficial to present textual and non-textual information in search results, where the display configuration of the textual and non-textual information are determined on-the-fly. It would be beneficial to present search results in one or more layouts or templates determined on-the-fly. It would be beneficial to provide focused advertisements based on conceptual sorting or grouping of the search results.